Monthly Media Mashup #5Media & Industry News – January 2018

Amazon Prime Shipped More than 5 Billion Items Last Year

Amazon shipped over 5 billion items worldwide in 2017 via its Prime program, including free same-day, one-day, and two-day shipping. Prime members also used their digital benefits in 2017 more than any previous year. In addition the company announced that December 30 was Prime’s biggest day for streaming, with Prime Originals ‘The Grand Tour 2’ and ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ as its top shows.

The importance of Amazon’s reach and its attractive (and convenient) customer offerings make it ideal for one-stop shopping online. With its recent foray into brick and mortar and the rise of personal assistant, Alexa, Amazon will continue to dominate online retail and sculpt its future.

Google Launches New Search Console Features

Google will roll out new reporting features for Search Console in the coming weeks. One of the most noteworthy updates is the ability to share critical issues from reports with multiple team members in your organization to expedite solutions, revoking access is also more intuitive.

The new Search Performance report is similar to the Search Analytics report, but now it provides 16 months worth of data. A significant improvement.

The Index Coverage report is similar to the existing Index Status report and shows webmasters how well Google is indexing their site. Users can easily explore issues and resubmit URLs for indexing once solved.

The AMP (accelerated mobile pages) Status report provides users with errors and warnings around AMP URLs with issue diagnosis and allows users to solve the problem and test. Once addressed, Google will crawl and reprocess the affected URLs with a higher priority.

As Google continues to refine and expand their Search Console offerings, webmasters and SEOs will become less reliant upon high-priced vendors.

DuckDuckGo Expands Private Search to Mobile App & Extension

DuckDuckGo, the niche search engine founded in 2008 with a total of 16 billion searches as of 2018, built its name with the promise to protect user privacy and search history. The search engine is now bringing its privacy-focused search capabilities to its mobile app, in the past it was limited to the search bar on duckduckgo.com. The app and browser extension now also block Facebook and Google tracking.

As DuckDuckGo continues to gain popularity, and web users become more privacy savvy, advertisers will have to rethink strategies particularly when it comes to retargeting using display networks like Google AdWords, Criteo, or AdRoll.

In a previous post we outlined how Facebook was taking steps to improve influencer endorsement transparency, last month the company added further clarification to the policy. In the update, Facebook makes it clear that publishers and creators can only use the branded content tagging tool to promote content they were involved in creating. They do not want people to accept anything of value for to post content they did not create, were not involved in the creation of, or not featured in. This rule change goes into effect in March and those that violate the policy may have their access to Facebook’s monetization tools eliminated.

Facebook is currently testing the ability to assign private messages to individuals on your team. This is a great solution to help streamline customer service requests and means that someone more knowledgeable in a certain area, or fluent in a particular language can step in easily to help once assigned.

YouTube Tightens Rules on Monetization

The YouTube monetization saga continues with the company raising requirements for creators whose channels must meet in order to monetize their videos. For monetization and to have ads attached to their videos, effective immediately, creators must have at least 4,000 hours overall watch time on their channel within the last 12 months and have at least 1,000 channel subscribers. if channels fail to meet the criteria they will not get income from ads.

YouTube has received complaints from advertisers over the past year regarding the appearance of ads alongside inappropriate videos. The recent Logan Paul Japan incident escalated the need for higher standards meaning creators cannot be rewarded financially for inappropriate content.

The company also plans to increase human vetting of videos that are featured as part of YouTube’s Google Preferred program that allows advertisers to pay to place their ads on high-performing videos on the site. This means advertisers participating in the program will have the reassurance of a human being verifying the content of a video (and ensuring it’s compliant) before their advertisement runs alongside it.

Twitch Secures Exclusive Content from Disney Digital Network Creators

Twitch recently sealed a landmark deal with Disney which sees four of its largest creators heading to Twitch to create exclusive content. Jacksepticeye, LuzuGames, Markiplier (gaming channels), and Strawburry17 (general and music) will create and manage Twitch channels, broadcast live and create exclusive video-on-demand content as part of a multi-year partnership between the two companies.

YouTube will be watching this development closely as companies continue to pitch alternative platforms to creators due to the recent monetization policy changes. As YouTube loses creators, they lose fan base traffic and impressions.

Instagram users can now add GIF stickers to any photo or video in their Instagram Story. When adding a sticker, users will see a new GIF search option, simply tap to open and search the library powered by GIPHY for lots of fun animated options. Instagram will also soon be rolling out the ability to upload photos and videos of any size to Stories, this means parts of a photo or video don’t have to be cut out to fit the typically portrait style space.

Snapchat Stories Opens Up to Facebook & Twitter Sharing

Content posted within Snapchat to its Stories option can now be shared across other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This could help broaden Snapchat’s userbase by generating more impressions. The sharing element only applies to ‘Stories’ at the moment and users are able to share publicly viewable links from Snapchat Official Stories, Our Stories and Search Stories.

About the Author:Jasmine Van Schaick is a Senior Marketing Specialist at Musictoday. She manages projects across affiliate marketing, display remarketing, organic SEO, corporate content development and more.